The present disclosure relates to apparatus and methods for an external agent to control the attention of a robot.
Controlling attention of autonomous robotic systems may be often required in a wide variety of applications, such as exploration, search and rescue, inspection, and/or navigation. Approaches for controlling attention that rely on a pre-programmed attention factors may not always perform adequately, particularly when operating in a dynamically changing real-world environment full of distractors. Manipulation of robots attention is commonly performed by modifying the robots software state via remote commands. However, such approaches are not often desirable because 1) it is idiosyncratic to the internal representational system of the robot, not always intuitive to the user. Finally, deploying a large number of remote operators may be considered a problem.